Now I’ve been aching to do mods to it. at first i planned on buying new wheels to make it look a lot better but i stumbled upon a Daihatsu applause in Germany. The outside is trashed but the engine is fine and the price was right… the perfect donor car! I ended up buying it. gonna tear it apart as time goes on.
It came on some aluminum wheels, i test fitted one and i like how they look but, they just need some thicker tires and I’m gonna have to lower the car . That’s for another time however, gonna focus on the engine first.!
I was advised to use 1.3 ecu with 1.6 engine on the same swap, as it has higher fuel cut (around 7200ish? Not sure) and has better high rpm power instead of low-end torque of an Applesauce. My Charade is being swapped at the moment, I will let you know how it works when finished.
Yes, I’m keeping my Charade gearbox as its a 4wd model. I think even with fwd you should go with Charade tranny, as probably Applesauce one has different fittings etc.
Little update,it’s been a while since i posted.
A while ago i took the engine out of the applause and will do the swap this week since i finally got time for it.
These wheels feel much better in the corners. Needs lowering soon too but the engine has priority for now. Me and my dad took the 1.3 out of the car today to make room for the 1.6.
Now I’ve read about people swapping the 1.3 gearbox on to the 1.6 and that the 1.3 driveshafts don’t fit to the 1.6 gearbox. but they seem the exact same to me, so we figured keeping the 1.6 gearbox would be better and just putting the 1.3 drive shafts in there.
I think they should fit but can anybody confirm this?
Hopefully the next update will be with the engine in and running
Engine got right in and all engine mounts bolted straight on. we started connecting everything. Most things were obvious and easy to find and only had to solder one plug over.
After everything was connected it was time for fluids, here we’re refilling the gearbox oil.
Now it was time to start the engine, it almost did but wouldn’t turn over, after some looking around we found that the water pump wasn’t moving because i used bolts which were too long, lesson learned.
Now with that fixed the engine started in one go and ran nicely but with a rather high RPM (about 2000) after some time it goes down but it does this on a cold start. The engine is running so let’s go for a drive right? Not yet. Found out that i ordered the wrong CV joints, they were the hole which goes over the axle was 1mm too big. put the put 1 original one back and a new (to me) axle on the other side and after that it’s driving!
The car drives great! it’s less lazy at the lower RPM’s and stronger in general. still need to fix the exhaust, we half the applause exhaust on it temporarily. only have the center muffler as of now. (which actually sounds really good…) but it’s mounted with some ti-wraps.
The engine runs good while driving and when it’s started but when i come to a stop the rpm’s start floating quite a lot, is there something i can do about this? applause throttle body on charade manifold? different ECU? the applause ECU made a fuse blow so that’s not going to work but i found a detomaso ECU for sale… or maybe it’s possible to adjust things on the engine itself?
Next things will be fixing the exhaust and getting a strut bar to stiffen up the chassis a bit.
